Old wine, new bottles

‘Old wine in new bottles’ must be the most protean idiom in the English language. I encountered it a few years ago, as a title to an article by the Romanian grandmaster Mihail Marin, who likes to lean upon his deep knowledge of the chess classics to elucidate games played in the modern era. (Recently he published a book of the same name, which grew out of a series of such articles.) That such vintage wisdom might still find favour with contemporary palates is, for Marin, something to celebrate.

So I was perplexed to learn that the phrase also refers to the practice of sprucing up something tired and unappetising. In neutral terms, ‘window dressing’, though when the object is a doomed relationship, I gather the Italians have a pungent phrase, ‘cavoli riscaldati’: reheated cabbage. At any rate, serving ‘old wine in new bottles’ can be somewhere between lazy, and cynical.